IN THE GUARDIAN, HAROLD EVANS ON BRITAIN, MUSLIMS AND TERROR:

The civil rights lobbies are working from a passé play book. They are blind to the lethal nature of the new Salafist totalitarianism. They won’t recognize that we are facing an irrationalist movement immune to compromise and dedicated to achieve its ends of controlling every aspect of daily life, every process of the mind, through indiscriminate mass slaughter. It is a culture obsessed with death, a culture that despises women, a culture devoted to mad hatreds not just of Americans and Jews everywhere, but of Muslims anywhere who embrace a less totalitarian, less radical, more humane view of Islam. These Muslims are to be murdered, and have been in their thousands, along with “the pigs of Jews, the monkeys of Christians” and all the “dirty infidels”.

Nor is the repellent language of hate limited to recognized terrorist groups like al-Qaida, Hizbullah and Hamas. It is in the school textbooks in Palestine and in the schools of our “ally”, Saudi Arabia. They promised to clean them up but a recent Washington Post investigation showed the books still tell the young they have a religious obligation to wage jihad against not only Christians and Jews but also Muslims who do not follow the xenophobic Wahabi doctrine. . . .

These are historic fault lines. The right tolerated fascism in the thirties, the left Soviet Communism in the fifties. Of course these two earlier totalitarian movements were different in nature and our response when it came was not always well judged – the tendency is to think first of the excesses of the right typified by the witch hunts of the odious McCarthy, but we should remember, too, that the Democratic party in the immediate postwar years of Henry Wallace would have abandoned Europe just as the left in the eighties would have left Europe at the mercy of the new Soviet missiles.

The apologists for the Islamo-fascists – an accurate term – leave millions around the world exposed to a less obvious but more insidious barbarism.

It’s only less obvious if you’re not paying attention. (Via Jeff Jarvis).